1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data deployment and more particularly to data deployment for video streaming to mobile devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of the Internet has enabled new modes of distributing electronic media including video. Whereas in the past, people had been satisfied to receive portable media for insertion into a playback device such as a video cassette player, compact disc player, digital versatile disc player in playing back media such as audio, video or both, the modern era has created an on-demand society in which people prefer immediate gratification in the retrieval of video without delay upon selection by the end user. Further, no longer is the end user content only to replay media on a fixed end user device such as a television set or personal computer. Rather, at present end users play back media on a multitude of mobile devices including cellular phones.
Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) Live Streaming (HLS or HTTPLS) is an HTTP-based media streaming communications protocol intended upon delivering media to mobile devices, where HTTP is a networking protocol for distributed, collaborative, and hypermedia information systems. In delivering media to a mobile device, HLS works by breaking the overall stream into a sequence of small HTTP-based file downloads, where each download can load one short part. Links to these parts are added to a playlist in the same time order that they appear in a video. Since HLS requests use only standard HTTP transaction, HLS is capable of traversing any firewall or proxy server that lets through standard HTTP traffic.
Streaming by way of HLS can be deployed at the edges of a wireless network as no special video delivery services other than a web browser is required, but the video must be deployed to the web server on the edge of a network in advance. Also, as a mobile client moves among wireless cell sites in a cellular system, this movement must remain transparent to the user. To do so each cell site has its own web server and domain name system (DNS) for delivering HLS and each is assigned the same internal IP address. When a mobile client moves to another cell site while playing a video, no interruption occurs on the mobile client, because the request gets resolved to that local web sever, which also has the video on hand. In this way, the video is stored on a local server and a local web server, which requires a large amount of storage. In addition, the transparency only includes the cell sites that have the playing video. In other words, if the mobile client moves to a cell site that does not have the playing video, the playing movie may be interpreted as the current cell site retrieves the video.
As an alternative, streaming can be done further back in the network where the IP connections from many cell sites are aggregated. But this can add latency to the network as well as can clog the network as each chunk of video is fetched individually. In addition, playlist updates must be checked for and retrieved when necessary, which can add to network traffic.